Question

I am new to PYTHON and trying to write script which replaces text in a text file. This is what I have come up with using Python 3.1. But I am having some errors. Would somebody help me, please?

#****************************************************************
# a Python code to find and replace text in a file.
# search_replace.py : the  python script
#****************************************************************

import os
import sys
import fileinput

print ("Text to search for:")
textToSearch = input( "> " ) 

print ("Text to replace it with:")
textToReplace = input( "> " )

print ("File to perform Search-Replace on:")
fileToSearch  = input( "> " )   # "rstest.txt"
#fileToSearch=open('E:\\search_replace\\srtest.txt','r')

oldFileName  = 'old-' + fileToSearch
tempFileName = 'temp-' + fileToSearch

tempFile = open( tempFileName, 'w' )

for line in fileinput.input( fileToSearch ):
    tempFile.write( line.replace( textToSearch, textToReplace ) )
tempFile.close()


# Rename the original file by prefixing it with 'old-'
os.rename( fileToSearch, oldFileName )

# Rename the temporary file to what the original was named...
os.rename( tempFileName, fileToSearch )

input( '\n\n Press Enter to exit...' )

---

Regards

Answer 1

If you enter a file path such as "E:\\search_replace\\srtest.txt", oldFileName will be "old-E:\\search_replace\\srtest.txt" and tempFileName will be "temp-E:\\search_replace\\srtest.txt", neither of which are valid.

Try doing something like this instead:

oldFileName  = "{}\\old-{}".format(*os.path.split(fileToSearch))
tempFileName = "{}\\temp-{}".format(*os.path.split(fileToSearch))